HE end of British domination of its colonial crown
jewel India in 1947 resulted in the breakup of the country
into two antagonistic states, Hindu-majority India and
Islamist Pakistan, the effects of which reverberate to this
day. They’ve been hostile from birth, when they slaughtered
each other’s minorities, as depicted in
Midnight’s Furies: The Deadly Legacy of India’s Partition.

Partition’s brutalities were worse than the
Nazi crimes: “…pregnant women had their breasts cut off and
babies hacked out of their bellies; infants were found
literally roasted on spits,” according to Nisid Hajari’s
riveting account. The author, who spent a decade as
Newsweek’s Asia
editor, is Asia editor for Bloomberg View.

Pakistan never overcame its hostile stance
against its neighbor, viewing India as an existential
threat.Both
states went on to develop a nuclear arsenal to keep the
other at bay.

Although Pakistan signed on to America’s war
on terror, reaping millions of dollars in U.S. military aid,
it continued to support the Taliban and other terrorist
groups while ensuring that Afghanistan remains within its
sphere of influence and not India’s. For Pakistan, the enemy
was, and still is, India.Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 328 pages, $15.95
Amazon.com Price: $12.95)

HE Nazis, in purging European culture of its Jews,
could not possibly have succeeded. The Jews would have
continued to live even after their extermination because
“they were part and parcel of its identity. Their memory
would have lingered. The crime committed against them would
have festered. The Nazis would have understood this
perfectly because they knew that physical annihilation was
no assurance for memory victory.”

How could a nation of poets and thinkers
perpetrate a genocide?

Germany went after the Jews and their Book
not in spite of being a nation of high culture but because
it was such a nation. The new morality of the master race
depended on the elimination of the old morality witnessed in
the Book of Books. The Nazis perpetrated the Holocaust in
the name of culture.

The Nazis exterminated the Jews because they
viewed them as representing key registers of time in German,
European and Christian history.

The Nazi memory project was built on a
contradiction: by assigning the Jews historical importance
that merited total extermination, they also ensured that the
crime would not and could not be forgotten, be it in a world
with or without Jews.

Such is the conclusion of Alon Confino,
history professor at the University of Virginia and at Ben
Gurion University in Israel in his fascinating book,
A World Without Jews.
Yale University
Press, softcover, 304 pages, $30.00
Amazon.com Price: $20.00)

AMERICA’S
BANKRenowned financial journalist
Roger Lowenstein’s sixth book, America’s
Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve, is a highly
entertaining and absorbing account of the creation of the nation’s central
banking system in the Federal Reserve Act of 1913. Although I feared the very
subject would be sleep inducing, the book gripped my interest page after page.
Money is not my strong suit (just ask Nina), but I found the story totally
engrossing. A Cornell graduate, Lowenstein wrote for The Wall Street Journal for
a decade. His distinguished father, the late Louis Lowenstein, was a Columbia
University law professor. Penguin Press, 368 pages, $29.95Amazon.com Price: $20.36)

FOLK
CITY is the companion book of the folk music revival
exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York, running till
November 29, 2015.This fascinating account of the origins of folk music
in Fun City was curated by Stephen Petrus and Ronald D.
Cohen, emeritus professor of history at Indiana University
Northwest in Gary, Ind. By World War II a thriving folk
culture emerged in New York connected with leftist streams
of ideology. One of these loosely organized groups was the
Almanac Singers, founded by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and
others who lived communally in a Greenwich Village loft.
They moved into a house and held hootenannies in the
basement to raise the rent. Their repertoire consisted
mostly of antiwar tunes. When Pearl Harbor struck, they took
a sharp turn from left and began to play patriotic songs.
Oxford University
Press, 320 pages, 150 photos, $39.95
Amazon.com Price: $33.09)

THE
ONION MAGAZINE: THE ICONIC COVERS Put down
The Economist,
close Time
magazine, take a break from
The New York Times,
and turn to this outrageous Onion book and enjoy a chuckle
from “America’s finest news source.” See the cover story on
medical malpractice: “How Suing His Doctor Brought One Man’s
Son Back to Life.” Then there’s the photo of a starving
child with the caption: “For only $5 per month, you can help
continue photographing this child.”And this breathless exclusive report: “Inside the
Obama White House, Specifically the Air Conditioning Duct
near the West Wing.” These are iconic covers “that
transformed an undeserving world.”Crazy, but funny.
Little, Brown and
Company, softcover, 262 pages, $17.99
Amazon.com Price: $15.86
(You get a free receipt with purchase!)

OUR
MATHEMATICAL UNIVERSE For one who never fathomed
math in school, I got thoroughly engrossed in this book that
explains our universe and beyond. That’s how excellent a
writer (and teacher) Max Tegmark is. How I wish I could sit
in at his physics class at MIT. I heartily recommend his
book to anyone interested in our expanding universe, in
Einstein’s discoveries, and the eye-opening multiverse. What
a trip! Alfred A.
Knopf, 422 pages, $16.95
Amazon.com Price: $10.87